Are Americans conservative?

In 1969, amid widespread violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the alarming public displays of a new “sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll” counterculture, Richard Nixon addressed himself to the “silent majority” of sensible, decent, conservative-minded American people. For the more than five decades since, conservatives have continued to appeal to what they felt sure was that silent majority, a median-voter demographic that didn’t like abortion, didn’t like same-sex marriage, and was ready to join them in opposing the “woke elites.”

Only it isn’t working anymore. In state after state since the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision in 2022, very vocal majorities have gone to the polls in defense of legal abortion. Even former President Donald Trump, who long boasted of his pro-life judicial appointments, effectively threw in the towel in his recent statement on abortion policy. What went wrong? Where did the “silent majority” go?

Well, nowhere. The silent majority is still there, and they are still “conservative.” The problem is, that although we keep using that word, it doesn’t always mean what we think it means. It is true that the average person is instinctively conservative. Most people are risk-averse and don’t like a ton of adventure; there aren’t too many skydivers in the world. Most people hate change—at least changes they themselves didn’t decide on—and grumble about the troublemakers foisting change upon them. Most people prefer some measure of cultural and political stability, so they can inhabit a world that makes sense to them, a world they’ve always known. But most people have short memories.

Consider these facts: The average American alive is 39 years old, and thus cannot personally remember a world before, say, 1989. Their only knowledge of such a world would have to come through education—either the handing down of wisdom by parents and mentors, or formal instruction at school. Neither form of transmission has been operating very well for the past 40 years, needless to say. For most people alive, then, the world of 1969, much less the world of 1869 or 1776, is simply terra incognita, known only to a small sliver of the highly educated, or those of devout faith in religious communities that still recite creeds from bygone days. That explains why only that narrow sliver—the conservative intelligentsia and a few religious traditionalists—are still staunchly “conservative” in the sense of conserving traditional moral convictions and ways of life, time-tested wisdom from centuries past on which our civilization was built.

Most people will instinctively react to conserve the traditions they know, but these traditions may often be of laughably recent vintage. Indeed, it can take only a few years to establish a new “tradition” that people will fiercely cling to, as anyone with experience of family holidays can attest. For most Americans alive today, the world of Roe v. Wade simply is traditional. That doesn’t mean they love abortion—they probably wish there were a lot fewer abortions—but they accept it as a fact of life, a fixture of the social and political world. The values it embodies, the social expectations for men and women it makes possible, the “right” it represents—all of these have been internalized by the silent majority as simply part of the status quo. Thus, confronted with the prospect of a post-Dobbs rending of the social fabric they knew, the silent majority reacted precisely as one might expect them to, taking to the ballot box to restore the disrupted status quo.

Americans are still conservative in a sense, but it is now radical individualism and materialism that many want to conserve. For decades they’ve soaked in that worldview, from influences as different as Supreme Court decisions and Seinfeld episodes. The median voter, then, will still go to the ballot to protest runaway immigration, for that is a disruption of the world he knows, but he will not go to the ballot to protest abortion, for that is the world he knows.

For authentic conservatives, who still know an even older world, this presents a challenge—politically speaking, an almost insuperable challenge. Politics can shape culture, to be sure, but in a democratic polity, you cannot simply reverse a cultural tide by political means. You can, perhaps, slow its progress, buying time for cultural renewal, but that renewal will have to come at the level of the imagination, educating the silent majority of Americans to recognize that there is a world more real and more true than the increasingly unreal one that has been presented to them these past 50 years.